


SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL: Captain Steve Rogers on the Fate of the Winter Soldier

by lusilly



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes Feels, Canon Compliant, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, Gen, Interviews, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Protective Steve Rogers, Winter Soldier Trial
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-04
Updated: 2018-06-04
Packaged: 2019-05-07 17:34:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14676045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lusilly/pseuds/lusilly
Summary: The world knows him as the Winter Soldier. In 1930s Brooklyn, Captain America knew him as James "Bucky" Barnes.Captain Steve Rogers grants an exclusive interview with The New Yorker following the fall of SHIELD.





	SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL: Captain Steve Rogers on the Fate of the Winter Soldier

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly, I'm just falling into Winter Soldier fever again and I needed to fill in some of the background between Winter Soldier, Avengers 2, and Civil War. It's canon as of AoU that they were looking for Bucky, but it seems to be on the DL - yet by Civil War the news and general public seems to know his name. [vine voice] America, explain!!!
> 
> Please bear in mind that I know nothing about news outlets so if this isn't appropriate for The New Yorker don't @ me. I am also not a journalist so if this supposed fictional journalist commits some grievous journalism error don't @ me. 
> 
> I don't know precisely why it became an article, it just made sense to me, to ground it in realism. The New Yorker cover art is by Tumblr user stereowire, used with permission: http://stereowire.tumblr.com/post/88946119123/war-children-its-just-a-shot-away-its-3am. Yes, I know it's awfully violent for the fucking New Yorker lmao I said don't @ me remember
> 
> Enjoy!

I meet Captain America, of all places, inside an Asian market in Arlington. He says he stops in here a lot. The people here don’t seem to recognize him, serving him a heaping double entrée plate of chicken adobo and a dozen lumpia, which are fried springrolls filled with ground meat and vegetables. When I ask, he admits he thought the same thing at first. 

“But they know who I am,” he says. “They’re just being polite.” He orders a Thai tea, complete with tapioca boba pearls, and recommends I try the same. “Sometimes the kids’ll come up and ask for a picture, but then you always see their parents shake ‘em down afterwards for bothering a customer.” He gives a shrug. “I don’t mind.”

I ask if he likes taking selfies, signing autographs. “I don’t mind,” he says again. “It was always part of the job.” What’s the craziest thing anyone’s ever asked him to sign? “I don’t know about crazy,” he laughs. “But I stopped by Maimonides-” Maimonides Health Center, a children’s hospital in Brooklyn “-for Halloween last year, and there was this kid in a full-on Cap costume. I signed the shield.” He asks if I’ll plug the Brooklyn Foundation for a Better Future, a children’s charity he’s a part of. I promise I will.

As we find a seat, other patrons walk by, either stopping at the deli for a snack or pushing shopping carts around the market. The little plastic fork they gave him looks tiny in Captain Rogers’s hand. He’s a big guy, just like he looks in the photographs – well over six feet, the shoulders of a linebacker, the biceps of a Greek god. You’d be surprised at how lithe he seems, though, how graceful: more like a gymnast than a wrestler. “No,” he says, graciously, when I ask him if he ever played either sport. “I was a skinny kid, remember?”

Skinny kids can be athletes, I say. “Not me,” he responds, poking at his adobo. “I used to get asthma attacks just walking home from school. Didn’t call it asthma back then,” he informs me. They did, actually – it’s listed by name among a dozen other illnesses on documents denying him enlistment in the US army. But he means something else. “They used to think it was one of those things,” he says. “All in your head.”

There’s a lot in Steve Rogers’s head lately. It’s been a mere three years since he woke up from the ice, barely two since the attack on New York. I ask him if he’s looking to move back to Brooklyn anytime soon. For a beat he considers this, then goes with: “I’m happy where I am,” which is, if nothing else, a safe answer.

Of course, all of that – the culture shock of adjusting to the 21st century, the sheer unfathomable horror of aliens descending out of a giant wormhole in the sky – pales in comparison to the fallout of this past summer. It was the District of Columbia’s hottest summer in a century, sending temperatures skyrocketing into triple digits. Even the thunderstorms barely broke the heat, boiling black clouds in the sky. On the day Captain Rogers took down three SHIELD helicarriers all on his own, it was ninety-eight degrees out. I ask him if he remembers how hot it was, and he answers, truthfully, no.

I ask him if he remembers what it felt like to get shot in the belly. “Yeah,” he answers, sipping his Thai tea out of a wide straw. “Hard to forget something like that.”

An iconic fixture of the D.C. skyline, the Triskelion was destroyed this summer when Captain Rogers rooted out a Nazi conspiracy within SHIELD's ranks.

The release of SHIELD secrets has been cataclysmic for US intelligence and covert operations, but of even more consequence than classified military materials was a series of contracts negotiated in the mid-1990s, when the former Soviet Union was struggling to retain its title as a global superpower by using whatever remaining leverage it possessed. Significant leverage was found in a particular asset, which was surrendered to the United States Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division, who kept it in a series of bases along the Eastern seaboard. It’s unclear the extent of the asset’s involvement with SHIELD prior to the fall of the Soviet Union, but it appears that HYDRA - the Nazi rogue science operation hidden within SHIELD's very ranks - frequently worked in tandem with the KGB special forces which handled the asset throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Or that’s the best explanation we have for the heavily redacted file on the assassination of President Kennedy, anyway.

Out of these contracts emerge a rough picture of the assassin who has been termed the Winter Soldier. (Rather poetically, this moniker has its origin in Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet on the Revolutionary War, _The American Crisis.)_ But in the files, he has no name. He is referred to exclusively as “the asset.” Any pronouns call him an “it” – an object, not a man.

Captain Rogers calls him Bucky.

“I don’t know,” he says, when I ask him about the nickname. “I always called him that. So did his family.” It’s an endearing diminutive, though slightly perplexing for a man named James Barnes. _(Buchanan,_ I finally figure out, drafting this article days later.) I ask Captain Rogers how long he’s known Bucky; he says for his whole life. How did they meet? The same way any kids meet, apparently: Bucky’s family lived down the street from Rogers, who was raised by a single mother until her death in 1936. They went to school together. They were altar boys at St. James together. I tell him I didn’t realize he was Catholic, and he shrugs, clearly not wanting to get into it. I wonder if that was some of the advice SHIELD gave him upon his reintroduction into the world: in interviews, never talk religion or politics.

But it’s unavoidable these days, in the state the world’s in. Unavoidable, considering the reasons Captain Rogers agreed to this interview in the first place.

When I ask him about SHIELD, about HYDRA, about everything that’s come to light since this past summer, Captain Rogers sits there with a heavy brow and tight lips, watching life go by around us. It strikes me for not the first time that Captain Rogers really is a man out of time – a man who lost decades of his life he’ll never get back, who’s been asleep longer than he’s been awake. Waking up in this world must have been like stepping onto a different planet, with all the people he knew and loved dead and gone. Maybe this explains why the search for his lost friend, for the fist of HYDRA and SHIELD’s best asset, for Bucky Barnes, has become somewhat of an obsession for him. Bucky represents a bright spark of familiarity in a sterile, desolate modern world: a magnetic north around which Captain Rogers can orient his personal compass rose.

I ask, “What do you know about him?” This time we’re not talking about Bucky; we’re talking about the Winter Soldier.

Clearly Captain Rogers is not comfortable with this, and I offer to move on. He shakes his head and says he’d like to answer this, as best as he can.

“I know he saved my life,” is what he says, a frown carved into his brow, as if out of marble. “When I fell into the river, I was as good as dead. He pulled me out.” Grim, he says nothing for a moment. “I have to believe that was for a reason. He’s in there. Underneath all the torture and manipulation and experimentation that they used to try and turn him into a weapon – he’s still there.”

I ask him if he’s read the de-encrypted files. He says no. He tried to, but half of it he barely understood, and the other half made him sick. Agent Natalia Romanoff, the Black Widow, formerly of SHIELD and now officially partnered with Anthony Stark’s Avengers Initiative – Captain Rogers calls her “Natasha” – read through them so he didn’t have to, and told him everything he needed to know.

“Not sick,” he amends. “It didn’t make me sick. I don’t get sick anymore.”

He says nothing, his head cocked towards one shoulder, his mouth screwed up in a grimace.

“It made me too angry,” he says.

-

He goes into spokesman mode at one point, like all those PSAs he filmed for the Department of Education. I know from history class and from the de-encrypted SHIELD files that Captain America has killed many men, both in war and for the cause of his country. I don’t ask him about those things; it doesn’t seem polite in the middle of a nice grocery and deli. But, knowing these things about him, I have to marvel at how wholesome and harmless he sounds, dispensing firm but prudent soundbites on the state of the country.

“SHIELD wasn’t all bad,” he admits. “It was full of people who wanted to do the right thing. People who had no idea what was happening behind closed doors.”

“People like you,” I say.

He nods. “I don’t regret bringing SHIELD down. It had to go. But a lot of good people died that day, and I don’t want anybody to think I’ve forgotten about them. If it weren’t for their sacrifice, I might not be here to talk with you today.”

I ask him if he thinks things could’ve turned out differently, had someone blown the whistle earlier. Before he made it out of the ice, even. He considers this, but his pause is not long.

“No,” he says, with finality. “I spoke with Armin Zola before that missile destroyed him. SHIELD was dirty from the day it was founded.”

By Howard Stark, I remind him. A friend of Captain America’s during the war; the father of a friend, today. Captain Rogers won’t comment on this.

By now, the mood of the conversation is rapidly shifting. I switch gears. Does he ever play curmudgeonly old man to the other Avengers? Remind Iron Man that he’s old enough to be his father?

“Absolutely not,” he laughs. “That would only make him less likely to listen to me.”

“I don’t see it that way,” he continues fairly. “I was a young guy when I went to war. Seventy years under ice doesn’t mean much.” He goes quiet; I want to ask another question, but I put it on hold, waiting for him to finish. When he looks up at me, he smiles. It’s almost sad. “It’s like I closed my eyes,” he says. “Like a blink. And in a fraction of a second, everything changed.”

He leans back in his seat. I ask him if he feels like he’s anywhere near caught up yet, a few years down the line. “No,” he answers, without hesitation. “You can’t catch up. You have to restart.”

Is that what he’s hoping will happen with Bucky?

Slowly, Captain Rogers nods. “He’s still waking up,” he says. “It’s going to take longer for him. Going to be harder. But he’ll get there.”

And when he does?

He shrugs. “I’ll be there.”

Captain Rogers arrives on Capitol Hill.

When Captain Rogers woke up, SHIELD hired a small army of cultural consultants to help him get back on his feet. “History and technology,” he tells me, “mostly.”

I take issue with this. If SHIELD taught him how to use modern tech, how come he still uses a phone like my 85-year-old grandmother?

He laughs, and contends the photo in question – a viral snapshot of Captain America peering down at his smartphone, looking utterly perplexed – was just bad timing. He asks, “What was it people were calling it – a mee-mee?” I tell him it’s pronounced _meem._ He takes the correction graciously. I want to ask him more about what it’s like being a modern superhero, what the other Avengers are like. My daughter is a huge fan of the Hulk.

But everyone is asking Cap about now. I get the impression _now_ is hard for Captain Rogers: a hard place to be in, a time of unbelonging, like a shadow of everything he used to know. Nothing throws that into such stark relief as the specter of the Winter Soldier, looming over us, weighing heavily against his conscience. Earlier, when I asked him about the transformation that turned him into Captain America, he told me: “It’s like looking at yourself in a funhouse mirror.” I imagine this is how Bucky Barnes might feel today, his own image twisted-up and unrecognizable, far from that sweet-faced patriot ready to fight for his country.

“He enlisted,” says Captain Rogers. “After Pearl Harbor. Didn’t waste a second. I remember his mother crying, she was in hysterics. He was her only son. She didn’t want him to go. His father on the other hand, he was proud.” According to Captain Rogers, the Barneses too were immigrants. He says Bucky’s parents spoke with accents, though they never taught their native language to their children, raising them instead to assimilate into American culture as best as they could. For immigrant families of a certain generation, this is a familiar refrain.

In 1940, Bucky’s first niece was born. His sister Rebecca was just nineteen and newly married. Her husband worked in the shipyards; she worked at a factory. During the daytime when she worked, she would leave the baby with her family. “He loved that baby,” Captain Rogers tells me, with a tight smile. “Out of everyone he had to leave when he got shipped out, I think he hated leaving that baby most of all.”

More than you?

“More than me,” he concedes. “Bucky was hoping to God my dumb ass would wind up collecting scrap metal in a factory somewhere. If they’d sent me to war the way I was when he left, I’d’ve been dead in days. He knew that.”

Trying to be gentle, I remind him that’s how war works. All men know there’s a chance they’re being sent out to die. I’m sure Bucky knew that, the day he was captured and sent to that HYDRA lab.

“I’m sure he’s been ready to die every day since,” agrees Captain Rogers, plainly. “You get used to that feeling pretty quick in war. But he’s not at war anymore.”

I weigh in. “Captain,” I say. “Seems to me like the Winter Soldier’s been at war for seventy years.”

Captain Rogers says, “Maybe.” Then he says: “But I’m not talking about the Winter Soldier. I’m talking about my friend.”

I’m skeptical. Mind control is tricky business, and the evidence that Bucky Barnes had been conditioned into a state of mindless obedience, more animal than man, more weapon than human, is overwhelming.

But sometimes animals have to be put down; sometimes a weapon poses such a profound threat to the future of humanity, that the only rational thing to do is to destroy it. I wonder what it feels like, to be trapped inside a head that doesn’t belong to you anymore. I wonder if the memories are gone forever, or if they might one day fade back into view, perhaps jogged by a familiar turn of phrase. Will Bucky Barnes ever remember his name? Not the name they gave him, but the name his handlers stripped from him in the decades he was imprisoned at the hands of crueler men. Will he remember his friend, that skinny kid from Brooklyn who was too dumb not to run away from a fight? Will he remember his sister’s baby? His parents’ accents? I wonder – does he even remember saving Captain America’s life?

This undated photo of Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes shows him as he was in the early years of the war.

So: who is James Buchanan Barnes? Will he be go down in the history books as the most prolific assassin this world has ever seen? Or maybe – just maybe – if history is kind to him – will he be honored as our country’s longest-serving POW?

That’s the question I’m left with as Captain Rogers shakes my hand and thanks me for coming to meet him. Waiting for him in the parking lot is a vintage motorcycle. When I realize what it's missing, I point out that D.C. has a mandatory helmet law. He looks suitably sheepish, but doesn’t pull one out. I wonder if he could survive a motorcycle accident, and then I remember watching the helicarriers fall out of the sky and crash into the Potomac on that scorching hot summer day, and I figure, yeah, he could probably walk it off. Besides: what cop is going to pull over Captain America?

The question of the Winter Soldier is not one which will be easily settled. The sheer scale of destruction, death, and peril caused by the bullets of the Winter Soldier is enough for any reasonable man to demand his capture and permanent removal from society. I would venture to guess that many consider him an enemy combatant, and wouldn’t protest if the US military issued a kill order to shoot on sight.

But Steve Rogers didn’t tell me anything about the Winter Soldier. He told me of a boy on a schoolyard who sought out the smallest, weakest, most helpless of his classmates, and decided he was going to protect him because nobody else would. He told me of the eldest brother to three younger sisters, the only son of immigrant parents who crossed a continent and an ocean to give their children the opportunities they never had. He told me about a brave and noble boy, who became a brave and noble man: a man who was offered the chance to return home after being rescued from Nazi experimentation in 1943, and turned it down. “He wasn’t going to abandon me,” says Captain Rogers, unwilling or unable to look me in the eye. “So I’m not going to abandon him.”

I ask him if he could say one thing to his old friend, what might it be? He considers this for a moment, clear blue eyes cloudy and troubled.

Then he says: “Come home.”

-

_Learn more at the Brooklyn Foundation for a Better Future at ForABetterFuture.org._

_If the Winter Soldier is out there, give me a call at 678-436-7092. Steve's waiting for you._


End file.
